Touring The Idea Factory....or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bell Labs

A Special Guest Post from Ben Gross, Research Fellow, Center for Contemporary History and Policy, at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Thanks Ben!)

First off, I would like to thank Dan and the other members of the AmericanScience community for offering a forum to discuss a subject near and dear to my heart: the history of corporate science. Specifically, I would like to take a moment to reflect upon the significance of this place:

Bell Labs, courtesy of Wikipedia

Behold, Bell Labs! Located in Murray Hill, New Jersey,
during the quarter century after World War II, this facility rose above all
others to become synonymous with American innovation. Although a relative
newcomer compared to research organizations at General Electric or Du Pont, the
technologies developed within its walls—most notably, the transistor—prompted Fortune magazine to identify it in 1958
as “the world’s greatest industrial laboratory.” Further achievements over the
coming decades, such as the launch of the first commercial telecommunications
satellite (Happy 50th birthday, Telstar!) and pioneering
work on solar panels, lasers, charge-coupled devices, and mobile telephony
reinforced the Labs’ reputation.

Indeed, by almost every measure—the size of its technical
staff, the number of patents it generated, total Nobel Prizes won—Bell Labs
eclipsed all rivals. Industrialists and policymakers scrutinized the work
underway at Murray Hill, eager to replicate its scientific and commercial
accomplishments. Corporations like Allied Chemical and Standard Oil,
attributing Bell Labs’ success to its campus-like atmosphere, went so far as to
construct their own research centers in suburban New Jersey. These firms, and
many others, also broadened their investments in fundamental research, due to
shifts in Cold War funding policies formulated in consultation with Bell
research managers like Mervin Kelly and William Baker.

Given this prominence, it is unsurprising that Bell Labs
has secured a central position in the historiography of corporate science.
Leonard Reich’s comparative analysis of G.E. and Bell, for example, was among
the first books challenging historians to treat research conducted in
for-profit settings on equal terms with academic laboratories. Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Life echoes Reich’s
argument and cites the behavior of Bell Labs’ managers both to call attention
to the artificiality of the sociological distinction between not-for-profit and
industrial science and to promote increased discussion of the latter. (Though
as Will Thomas recently observed,
the scope and objectives of such a research agenda remains a matter for debate
among scholars like David Edgerton and Philip Mirowski.) Whether compiling
surveys of 20th century "big science" or focused case studies of the
constituent technologies of the digital age, a mention of Bell Labs is almost
inevitable.

Which is why my immediate reaction to the news that
journalist Jon Gertner had published another volume on the subject was a
combination of curiosity and frustration. For although I am always pleased to
see the history of industrial science receive greater public attention, I
worried that this new book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of
American Innovation, would merely rehash the earlier literature and
reinforce the notion that Bell Labs was the be-all and end-all of corporate
R&D. "Thank goodness," I joked. "Bell Labs hasn't received
enough attention over the years. Finally, someone
will take a moment
to recount the origins
of the transistor!"

Sarcasm aside, I was excited to read Gertner's account,
particularly after learning he would be dropping by the Chemical
Heritage Foundation (CHF), where I am currently working as a postdoctoral
researcher, for a public conversation with fellow electronics historian David Brock. The event was held last Wednesday
and on the whole I was pleasantly surprised, both with the book and Gertner's
willingness to acknowledge the challenges associated with compressing nearly a
century of complex scientific and political history into a relatively brief 350
pages.

The sheer scale of the Bell Labs organization forced
Gertner to confront a question familiar to historians of collaborative research:
how to winnow down an otherwise overwhelming array of actors into a coherent
cast of characters. In the CHF discussion, Gertner acknowledged that his
initial approach utilized technologies as an organizing framework (one chapter
on the transistor, one on satellites, etc.), but that he ultimately discarded
that scheme to concentrate on a handful of key figures ranging from managers
like Kelly and Baker to scientists like William Shockley and Claude Shannon.
While his choice of actors was not arbitrary—nearly all self-identified as
members of a prominent group of researchers nicknamed the "Young
Turks"—Gertner's final chapter hints at a persistent tension between
"the individual versus the institution." (358) To what extent, he
asks, can the efforts of a select handful shed light on the dynamic realities
of the corporate research enterprise? Gertner never provides a decisive answer,
either in his book or his CHF visit, preferring to concentrate on his chosen
few while occasionally gesturing towards the otherwise unrecognized masses of
technicians and development engineers working behind the scenes.

Similarly, while Gertner sometimes called attention to
the fact that Bell Labs was not the only industrial research laboratory
exploring solid-state phenomena, he was less interested in highlighting
interactions between Murray Hill and other firms. Indeed, Bell Labs scientists
in Gertner's account might as well have been working in a bubble, isolated from
counterparts at GE, IBM, RCA, and other companies sharing an interest in
electronically active materials. Situating Bell Labs as one research center
among many, however, would have strengthened his case that its
accomplishments were only possible due to its unique status as the research arm
of a government-sponsored monopoly. So long as AT&T retained its position
as the sole caretaker of America’s telephone network, it could pursue a wide
range of research projects without worrying about time pressures associated with
competition. Once the government forced AT&T to divest of its local
affiliates, the so-called Baby Bells, in 1984, the Labs found itself under the
gun as money was diverted towards short-term projects. Having never needed to
worry about market research in the past made the successful commercialization
of such work all the more challenging.

Gertner's success in driving home the point that Bell
Labs was the exception rather than the rule so far as industrial research was
concerned is, I believe, his most lasting contribution to the historiography of
corporate science. One could see hints of this in the questions following his
CHF talk, where several audience members asked him to speculate about what
would have happened if AT&T had retained its monopoly beyond the 1980s.
Rather than delve too deeply into the counterfactual, Gertner responded by
noting the contrasting attitudes of Bell Labs personnel and modern venture
capitalists concerning competition. While contemporary firms tend to frame
competition as a driver of innovation, Bell Labs provides a powerful
counterexample, suggesting that the absence of rival firms can facilitate the
maturation of technological projects that might otherwise be canceled due to
concerns with short-term profit margins.

Regardless of the merits of either position, Gertner
emphasized that the economic and legal frameworks associated with Bell Labs'
successes were historically contingent. One could not simply transplant their
research model to another firm or industry and recreate the atmosphere of
Murray Hill. This willingness to treat Bell Labs not as some idealized endpoint
that other research organizations failed to reach but as the beneficiary of a
unique set of economic and legal circumstances, is the most compelling aspect
of Gertner's book. It is certainly enough to differentiate it from the vast
majority of writing on the subject and persuade even the most jaded historian
of corporate science to give Bell Labs another look.

5
comments

Ben: this is fascinating. Thanks for contributing. I appreciate the opportunity to hear about Gertner's choice to abandon the technology as an organizing device in favor of individuals. (And I love Claude Shannon!) But I also appreciate the central tension you identify in many industrial histories: how to balance the larger institutional story against the work of individuals. Inevitably we use individuals to tell our stories (they're more interesting), but it's crucial to remember how much individuals are shaped by their institutions.

It occurs to me that I really need to join some self-identified club---the X club, Metaphysical Club, Young Turks...They're all so cool.

But let's not get side-tracked from Ben's great questions. Was it the man or the institution that built Theseus, the maze-solving robot mouse? I do not recall where I read it, but I think Shannon and his colleagues spent many an afternoon racing mechanical mice through mazes while betting on the results. Now that's an institutional culture!

It seems like you can tell a racing-mechanical-mice-through-mazes-while-betting-on-the-results story as part of an argument (1) that institutions (or "institutional culture") drive innovation, (2) that particular individuals (who create said culture) drive it, *or* (3) that isn't about "what drives innovation" at all.

Which is to say: human/institution, agency/structure questions only have to get answered if you ask them, and lots of books don't – they either ask other questions, or just tell a good story.

Ben, here's a question: how do we square the cultural similarities between Bell Labs and more recent SV firms (Google, Facebook), which more or less consciously imitate the climate of BL with a rhetoric of "insulating" creative (at least in part) from the demands of short term profits?

Has BL's fun basic-research culture actually been "incorporated" into the system from which it was formerly insulated? If so, is it still seen as important to pretend like it's all fun and games, or is there now a way of squaring profit-speak and just-for-fun-research-speak within the firm?

From where I sit, the discrepancy you mention is a consequence of the very large shadow that Bell Labs and the linear model have cast upon the discourse of American innovation. Firms like Google and Facebook may frame themselves as modern day Murray Hills. (Google, Gertner notes, has gone so far as to reinstate the old Bell Labs tradition of encouraging workers to devote up to 20% of their time to undirected research.) But none of them is in a position where it can, for all intents and purposes, ignore the pressures of an ever expanding, increasingly globalized market. The only way to survive in such an environment is to recruit the smartest people on the block, and the most effective means of accomplishing that task is to present oneself as, to borrow a phrase from Mervin Kelly, “an institute of creative technology.” While executives may therefore shudder at the prospect of sponsoring fundamental research to the same degree as Bell Labs, they can take comfort in the fact that adopting aspects of that model will benefit their company, either directly (i.e. through the creation of a new technology) or indirectly (i.e. through the cultivation of a highly trained workforce).